Download PDF | (Edinburgh Studies in Religion in Antiquity) Stanley Stowers - Christian Beginnings_ A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion-Edinburgh University Press (2024).
329 Pages
introduction Gifts Received: An Autobiographical Introduction
I beg the pardon of my readers for indulging in some autobiographical reflection. I justify the endeavor because I am often asked how I came to the approaches that I use and why they have made sense to me. Hopefully, this narrative of a few salient episodes can serve as an orientation to the chapters here that originally spanned many years of my career and varied interests. Looking back, and I realize the ever-present risks of corrupt and selective memory, the questions that have animated me already started taking form in graduate school so that I must credit professors, fellow students and the stirrings of the field at the time for the options available and directions taken.1 I cannot claim originality.
It was an exciting time when several developments were beginning to shake up the staid areas of New Testament Studies and Patristics. For one, as Abe Malherbe explained to us, some generations of brilliant continental scholarship by individuals steeped in a knowledge of the Greek and Latin texts and cultures had been made to all but disappear with the rise of dialectical theology and the Biblical theology movement from the late 1920s through the 1950s and beyond. The pure Old Testament/Jewish origins of Christianity had only later been corrupted when enveloped by Hellenism. But worse than the ideology was the loss of scholars who had a deep knowledge of the ancient world. As I struggled through my studies at Yale, issue after issue vindicating Malherbe’s judgment came to light, even though it was a place that strongly emphasized the “Jewish background” of the New Testament, and Malherbe did not disagree. The Dead Sea Scrolls were much at the center of attention with Nils Dahl and Wayne Meeks among those who taught us that literature. In slightly different ways, all three of our professors taught us to resist the ideologically driven oppositions between Judaism and Hellenism.
The message was only reinforced by the young Carl Holladay who taught us the importance of Hellenistic Judaism. The Department of Religious Studies at Yale had only recently separated from the Divinity School, with varied reactions of happiness and unhappiness among faculty.2 Because of this divorce the question of the place of the study of religion in the non-sectarian university was constantly in the background and often explicit. Before coming to Yale, I already knew that my interests were not in the two dominant approaches to New Testament Studies and early Christianity. Studying with the generous and charismatic Chris Beker made this particularly clear to me. Beneath all of the scientific apparatus of textual historical study was a highly normative enterprise of producing Christian theology. On my view, this came in two major forms. The first explicitly located itself as work from inside the church, either some particular tradition or The Church. The second, especially a European phenomenon, took theology or New Testament Studies to be a kind of disciplinary area like philosophy. It seemed to me that it was more like the production of normative thought for something like Christian civilization.
The relatively new phenomenon of religious studies departments was located somewhere among the arts and sciences, the humanities and social sciences, but where exactly should they be conceptually in relation to other areas, methodologically and so on? All of these areas, of course, centrally involve normative commitments, but in quite different ways. My decision of where to go for doctoral work came down to either the University of Chicago or Yale. A young Jonathan Z. Smith was starting to make a name as a scholar of early Christianity who brought the area into contact with something called the history of religions and the generic study of religion. His article, “The Wobbling Pivot,” had made a great impression on me, and Smith’s notions of locative and utopian religion stuck with me and have contributed to my work on religion as a social kind and my idea of ancient Mediterranean religion.3 I also liked that Smith’s work was informed by philosophy and considered issues about language and knowledge. In my MA work, D. Campbell Wyckoff had us read and discuss Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I tried to follow the controversy about the book and the encounter convinced me that all areas of knowledge and of the academy needed to justify themselves. When the chips were down, I did not have the courage to study with Smith.
Trained as I was in conventional Biblical Studies, I wanted to enter into that academic world with new approaches, but Smith’s work seemed like a different world. At the national meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1973, I attended the organizing session for a new group, “The Social World of Early Christianity,” co-chaired by Wayne Meeks. The programmatic paper, “The Social Description of Early Christianity,” was presented by Jonathan Smith. I then learned about the exciting work that Meeks was doing and his ambitions for social description. Throughout my career, I think that I have been torn between the caution of Meeks and the boldness of Smith, not that I could begin to compare myself to either. I decided that I would go to Yale and seek to write a dissertation with Meeks. In Wayne’s seminars we read a great deal of theory from Clifford Geertz and Mary Douglas to Peter Berger. Afterwards I would constantly read widely in social and literary theory. But most of the actual publications of Meeks and the students looked more like conventional social history not unlike that of Ramsay MacMullen’s in Classics who was taking in us students in early Christianity and teaching us how to use epigraphical and archeological sources. Plans changed, however, when I discovered the diatribe in the Malherbe seminar, “The Hellenistic Moralists and the New Testament.” The number of books, articles and careers that have found their beginnings in the years of that seminar is astounding. Malherbe seemed to us to be opening up an unexplored continent that often brought the passages in and issues of the early Christian writings to life in striking ways. My dissertation, though heavily philological, argued the case for the social setting of the literature known as “exhibiting the style of the diatribe.”
I developed an interest in the ancient rhetoric, but what has continued until the present to be most productive for me has been Malherbe’s approach to ancient philosophy as a social phenomenon, and not just its usual treatment within the history of ideas. In the 1990s I discovered a perfect fit here with the sociological category of “the intellectual” developed most famously by Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu. With my chastened approach and dissertation topic on Romans, I did much course work on Paul. At that time New Testament Studies was dominated by the Bultmann School and by German scholarship. Malherbe, Meeks, Dahl, Holladay and the newly arrived Bentley Layton all looked to other models of scholarship. But Dahl brought something special that would shape my thinking. He introduced us to Scandinavian scholarship that was engaged with the great tradition of German scholarship, but different especially in the way that it treated Judaism and read the New Testament writings without an anti-Jewish straitjacket. I discovered scholars like Johannes Munck, Krister Stendahl, Jacob Jervell and Nils Dahl’s own long oeuvre.4 By the time that I completed the dissertation, I had decided that another book on Romans was needed that would somehow avoid the historically unjustifiable anti-Judaism that was a constant in the scholarship.
The Yale years were at the height of the “linguistic turn” that deeply affected all but the most hidebound areas of the humanities and social sciences. Malherbe told me that the faculty liked that I had mentioned my interest in the Russian Formalists in my application. An amazing scene was going on at Yale in French Studies and Comparative Literature. A friend who was a graduate student in Spanish talked me into reading Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. I found it interesting and had done enough reading in philosophy to be skeptical, but then I did not understand all of it. That encounter and my friend made me into somewhat of a voyeur of the scene with Derrida coming for several months of each year to give seminars with lectures he read that more than challenged my French. Paul de Man, Hillis Miller and other soon-to-be doyens of deconstruction would hold forth and debate.
Although deeply excited by the evolving approaches that I only partly understood at the time, I did not take that direction. But one thing that stuck with me from the prevailing literary theory showed up in Rereading of Romans. 5 That was the conviction that even the historian needed to read the literature in terms of kinds of imagined readers and consider even the author as a kind of reader. The dominant models of disciplinarity that enticed involved accepting a literary approach as the queen of the sciences – everything was about text and language – or alternatively social history informed by cultural anthropology (favored by Meeks). I decided that the role of the historian informed by a critical filtering of the literary was the way to go and tried my hand with Rereading of Romans. I was still left with a big question that sat in the shadows at Yale, but that burst into the open when I arrived at Brown. What about the study of religion? Was it not a bizarre situation for academics who constantly studied what everyone admitted centrally involved religion to not have thematized and theorized it? Jonathan Z. Smith thought that it was bizarre. Who, for instance, would accept literary studies without thematized and theorized notions of literature and language? The issue was brought home to me when in my last coursework at Yale, the faculty decided that it was somewhat of a scandal for the Department of Religious Studies to not have a course or seminar on the study of religion or on theory of religion. No one came up with a course, so they arranged for a different member of the faculty to meet with the graduate students each week and hold forth on how each person’s area reflected the study of religion.
The experience was eye-opening to say the least. The struggles of these brilliant scholars to say something coherent was often embarrassing. Charting some ways that my thought has developed can perhaps best be done by briefly noting the effects of going to Brown, of two Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) units, the topics of sacrifice and the letters of Paul.
Brown in religious studies and in the study of western antiquity was an exceedingly lively place in the 1980s. If Yale at the time did not know how to talk about the study of religion and theory of religion, Brown was the opposite: those were the hot topics. Jacob Neusner at that time wrote persuasively that Judaism should be studied alongside other religions as religion and not set apart. John Reeder, Sumner Twiss and others taught and wrote about ways to theorize religion, and worked partly from the philosophy of religion. Nearly every year the department would sponsor a major conference on some topic such as magic and religion and ritual and religion. Professors even in historical areas were expected to relate their particularities to the larger study of religion. I came with a steep learning curve challenging me. The combination was no easy matter in the study of the New Testament and early Christianity where in the larger academy away from Brown I quickly encountered a strong allergic reaction to the combination of theory and conventional historical critical study. I also had amazing colleagues in the study of Greco-Roman and West Asian antiquity throughout my career at Brown.
The colleagues and Brown’s emphasis on inter and cross-disciplinary exchange nourished my work, but not much in the direction of theory. After Neusner left, Shaye Cohen, then Saul Olyan and Michael Satlow became valued colleagues in the study of ancient Judaism and the Hebrew Bible following a Brown tradition that went back at least to Horatio Hackett in the 1830s, and J. R. Jewett and David Blaustein teaching Aramaic, Akkadian, Hebrew and Syriac in the 1890s. I formed an especially close working bond with Olyan and we constantly shared graduate students and dissertation advising. The riches were equally abundant from Classics, Egyptology, Old World Archeology and Art and other related areas stimulated by the ongoing Seminar for the Culture and Religion of the Ancient Mediterranean. At the risk of leaving names out, the long-term relations with David Konstan and John Bodel in Classics must be mentioned.
The vigorous area of ancient philosophy revolved around Martha Nussbaum and Konstan. Soon after I arrived, Horst Moehring, the senor person in ancient Christianity, died and Stephen Gero had just moved to Tübingen. I was suddenly the senor person and we hired Susan Ashbrook Harvey to focus on later antiquity and then Ross Kraemer to create a strong new graduate program. None of these great colleagues had a marked interest in theory of religion until Kraemer arrived and my thinking probably would not have flourished had it not happened that no one was available to teach either the undergraduate or the graduate level seminars on theory of religion. I jumped at the opportunity. This seems a good point to interject that I have learned more and received more from the decades of amazing graduate students than any other source. By the early 1990s, I had concluded (along with the students) that none of the reigning theories such as the culture-as-text theory of Clifford Geertz were without serious problems. As the academy gradually moved away from structuralism/post-structuralism, social theory of practice arose as an attempt to solve some of the problems. I became mostly convinced and started thinking of how it might work with religion.
The graduate students caught on and organized a symposium with Theodore Schatzki as the main attraction. One of the issues that continually arose was how to individuate religion as a social practice. Later, when I saw the newly established field of cognitive science of religion as providing resources for individuation, the students organized a splendid international conference with Edward Slingerland as the featured speaker.6 Several things important to me happened in the first half of the 1990s. I published Rereading of Romans, based on a decade or so of thinking about Paul; joined the consultation of two new SBL units; and discovered both practice theory and the cognitive science of religion. One measure of how my thinking has changed comes in the topic of sacrifice that I latched onto in the late 1980s as a cross-disciplinary topic prominent in ethnography, but also in the study of the ancient world including Judaism and Christianity. Such a central religious practice seemed perfect for developing a comparative and theoretical approach to early Christianity situated in its milieu. One result was “Greeks Who Sacrifice and Those Who Do Not,” one of my most widely read and cited articles.7
My current views seen in “The Religion of Plant and Animal Offerings Versus the Religion of Meanings, Essences and Textual Mysteries” (Chapter One in this volume) illustrate how I have changed. My general inspirations for “Greeks Who Sacrifice” were especially cultural anthropology of the era, Jonathan Z. Smith’s work, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. All were deeply indebted to structuralism and so-called post-structuralism in different ways that I came to see as problematic even while acknowledging their significant contributions. Such things as “schemes of oppositions in the body” and strong semantic holism will not work. I still see powerful relations of animal sacrifice to gender, descent and orders of power, but would now emphasize social indexing and the exploitation of evolved cognitive biases. But I was wrong to pick out animal sacrifice from the larger context of all types of offerings to the gods, and I underemphasized the role of the human imagination about exchange with the gods and similar beings. My recent effort adds minds to human practices and agency, which the earlier theoretical inspirations lacked or thought of in structuralist ways. The earlier piece on sacrifice also lacked a viable theory of religion.
I had been involved in several SBL groups including “The Social History of Early Christianity,” (later “. . . of Formative Christianity and Judaism”) but by the early 90s I was disillusioned with what seemed to me either superficial nods to social theory or reiterations of conventional New Testament Studies by tacking on old fashioned social history that changed nothing. Two new units came to my rescue, the first inspired by Abe Malherbe, “Hellenistic Moral Philosophy and Early Christianity.”8 Leaders of the unit included John Fitzgerald, L. Michael White, David Runia, David Konstan and Troels Engberg-Pederson. The tremendously productive group that published several volumes was stimulating partly because it drew in the participation of very many of the greatest scholars in ancient philosophy from Europe and North America. These were sophisticated thinkers who often were also highly knowledgeable in modern philosophy. Without the unit I probably would have allowed my work in the area to have lapsed. My recent “The Dilemma of Paul’s Physics: Features Stoic-Platonist or Platonist-Stoic?” (Chapter Six in this volume) shows the continuing fruit of that stimulation. I began my participation in the second SBL unit with the consultation at the New Orleans meeting of 1996 when I presented a paper for the proposed “Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins.”
The brilliant idea for the unit thought up by Burton Mack and Jonathan Z. Smith was a kind of major experiment for which theory of religion and wider social theory inspired by Smith’s work would be brought together with detailed reconsideration of conventional approaches to Christian texts and notions of beginnings. Although the first years were devoted to gospel’s sources and issues where I was less comfortable, I found the debate and discussion about various theoretical approaches tremendously productive for my own thinking and as a place to air that thought. The paper I presented in 1996, since much revised and augmented, became the first of my publications to put together the basic elements of my current theoretical and historical approach (Chapter Four in this volume). I have continued to use and to be inspired by Smith’s scholarship. One area where I went my own way has been in leaving behind the exclusively Neo-Kantian social mind of the structuralist legacy and instead appropriating the evolved mind of the biological sciences seen in the cognitive sciences and mainstream linguistics. I also could not follow the parts of his thought that were too close to Neo-Kantianism in what I considered Smith’s inconsistent flirtation with anti-realism. In 1999, a cognitive science of religion conference was held at the University of Vermont.9 With hosting by Luther Martin, some of us from the Ancient Myths Seminar, including Smith, attended and met to assess where we were in our discussions about theory. At one point a few of us met with the groundbreaking French cognitive anthropologist and linguist Dan Sperber, who had recently published his celebrated Explaining Culture. 10
He presented his ideas to our small group with a talk. With Sperber, a former student of Claude Lévi-Strauss who had moved on, and with LéviStrauss a central Smith inspiration, the Sperber/Smith encounter was most interesting. At the end of it, I think that only I and Luther Martin were convinced by Sperber. Later Smith, Burton Mack, Ron Cameron, Merrill Miller and I met over amazing locally discovered bargain bottles of the monumental 1989 Produttori Barbaresco that lubricated a long discussion with Smith about everything from Sperber to his relations with Mircea Eliade. Smith was quite open and interested, but extremely cautious about the cognitive psychology. I knew that being persuaded by it meant big changes in my own thinking about theory. For one thing, it meant that the humanist’s seat-of-the-pants intuitive thinking could not be the sole arbiter of social theory or historical research. All along I maintained my interests in the New Testament and especially the letters of Paul, but as time went on Paul more and more came to serve as an exemplar of broader social tendencies and I discovered that because of that framing his thought and social matrix made increasingly better sense. But even by more traditional standards my mind has changed in various ways. Perhaps the biggest flaw in Rereading of Romans comes in a central element of Paul’s thought that is mostly missing, participation in and assimilation to Christ. I am still convinced of the basic argument of the book and my take on the rhetoric of the letter with tweaks here and there as well as Paul’s relations within Judean religion. I think of two reasons for participation missing at that time – what I now consider to be absolutely central to Paul’s thought. First, the scholarship dominating then, with the exception of E. P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism, simply occluded the evidence in the way that it read justification by faith alone as Paul’s totalizing obsession. Those you argue against always shape your argument.
I later had the opportunity to write “What is Pauline Participation in Christ” for the volume in honor of Ed Sanders (Chapter Eight in this volume).11 Second, although I had worked out Paul’s notion of Gentile descent from Abraham through participating in Christ by way of God’s pneuma in the book, I made only minor use of those ideas, and had not figured out how to account for the wealth of language that suggested both assimilation and a richer participation.12 I had long noted the scholarly idiom of pointing out that Paul was using Platonic language here and there and been convinced that Romans 7 was explainable with clarity using a Platonic moral psychology as argued in the book. What I probably would not have seen if I had not stuck with the Hellenistic Moral Philosophy and the New Testament unit was that the Platonic language really was Platonic as later Christian intellectuals recognized and not a bizarre cover for supposedly uniquely Jewish or “Old Testament” ideas. Like Philo, Paul uses these conceptions newly prominent in his time. But he used them to explain how the baptized become assimilated to the archetype, Christ, and share his mind and pneuma. To a large extent, due to certain invitations to present papers, my thought coalesced in two areas that changed all my work. Thinking came together on theory of religion and around the idea of there being something coherent that we could call “ancient Mediterranean religion.”
It included and helped to explain both Judean religion and the emergence of Christianity. In 2004 I was asked to present a paper for a conference on National Socialism (the NSDAP) and religion. Due to the prevalent idea of Nazism being a “secular religion” based on the then popular idea of political religion, I found deep and hopeless confusion among historians of modern Europe about what religion is and how to treat it historically. Yes, certain religious traditions such as Christianity, Islam and so on teach that the true religion is the most important thing in any human life, but religion cannot be delimited by what is important to people or what they feel most strongly about. That approach ends up making such things as one’s politics or football or golfing religion. You cannot use secondary properties that just some expressions of religion have for defining it. It happens to be a historical fact that most religion of most people across the globe and across time has not featured “the most important.” There had to be a better way to individuate religion as a human social phenomenon and such individuation of the kind had to feature the tendencies for human cognition to imagine interaction with a class of beings featuring gods and related non-evident beings.13 I think that my first published piece where I appealed to cognitive psychology in making that case was the article in the Journal of Contemporary History based on that paper from the conference.14 But, of course, the true challenge was to work out how to theorize the social in religion as a human phenomenon. One way to chart changes on that project would come from trying to explain how I got from “The Ontology of Religion” in a 2008 volume in honor of Jonathan Smith to my recent writings about religion as a social kind.15
The former approach featured social theory based on theory of social practices. I have not renounced that theory, but now find it too partial and unable to deal with the complexity needed for understanding the social – when treated as a comprehensive theory of the social. The approach via practice theory now fits into a much larger picture. In the last twenty years, I have often felt like I was running up against a brick wall in trying to work with the way that social theory is used in the humanities and especially religious studies, for instance, getting turned into methods for reading texts, or into ideas or purported identities or notional communities. It took me a long time to diagnose the heart of the problem as legacies from idealism and other anti-realisms that most of the university had long ago left behind. So, I went to mainstream thought and brought back social kinds. The world is lumpy, dividing up into entities. How does one know what these are, including in the social world, their causes, their building blocks and means of stability and instability? Following the development of philosophy, the philosophy of sciences, and social scientific theory to recent times, religion looked like a perfect candidate for being explained as a social kind.
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